MPs call for compulsory relationship education - "The UK has twice the level of teenage pregnancy of France and Germany... While the level of teenage pregnancy was brought down by the previous government's efforts - between 1998 and 2010 it came down by 24% - the numbers of babies born to women aged between 15 and 19 remains the highest in Western Europe... Many agreed that while there was, in the words of their report, "plenty of information and availability of contraception... the relationship advice that should go with this is totally absent.""Girls who do not become pregnant are also penalised by the system, the report warned, “creating a perverse incentive to become pregnant in order to gain social housing”" - even in the decision to get pregnant, economic incentives affect behavior; the law of unintended consequences still holds

Does the Earth's magnetic field cause suicides? - "a 2006 review of research on cardiovascular health and disturbances in the geomagnetic field in the journal Surveys in Geophysics (DOI: 10.1007/s10712-006-9010-7) concluded that a link was possible and that the effects seemed to be more pronounced at high latitudes"

Breast Prosthesis | Attachable Breast Forms | MyRealBreast.com - "RealBreast is a line of ultra realistic wearable breast forms available in multiple sizes and 6 standard skin tones: fair, medium, tan, Asian, light-African and dark-African. These colors encompass most natural skin tones. In addition, you may custom blend the silicone color with your skin using blushes and/or foundation make up powders, or alcohol based body inks. Our product is perfect for anyone desiring to emulate the look and feel of natural breasts. Whether you're crossdressing, a transgender individual, or a woman looking for fuller breasts, we have the perfect solution here!"

Exaggerating the strength of the Israeli lobby. - "For purposes of contrast, let us look at two other regional allies of the United States. Both Turkey and Pakistan have been joined to the Pentagon hip since approximately the time of the emergence of the state of Israel, which coincided with the Truman Doctrine. Pakistan was, like Israel, cleaved from a former British territory. Since that time, both states have carried out appalling internal repression and even more appalling external aggression. Pakistan attempted a genocide in Bangladesh, with the support of Nixon and Kissinger, in 1971. It imposed the Taliban as its client in a quasi-occupation of Afghanistan. It continues to arm and train Bin Ladenists to infiltrate Indian-held Kashmir, and its promiscuity with nuclear materials exceeds anything Israel has tried with its stockpile at Dimona. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and continues in illegal occupation of the northern third of the island, which has been forcibly cleansed of its Greek inhabitants. It continues to lie about its massacre of the Armenians. U.N. resolutions have had no impact on these instances of state terror and illegality in which the United States is also partially implicated. But here's the thing: There is no Turkish or Pakistani ethnic "lobby" in America. And here's the other thing: There is no call for "disinvestment" in Turkey or Pakistan. We are not incessantly told that with these two friends we are partners in crime. Perhaps the Greek Cypriots and Indians are in error in refusing to fly civilian aircraft into skyscrapers. That might get the attention of the "realists." Or perhaps the affairs of two states, one secular Muslim and one created specifically in the name of Islam, do not possess the eternal fascination that attaches to the Jewish question"

Singapore Hall of Shame: Alfian Saat's Untold Secrets - "Oh...I wonder how does Alfian feel when the Malaysians call Singapore dog during the last Suzuki Cup (http://sg.sports.yahoo.com/news/malaysia-dog-football-chant-riles-singapore-fans-055434743--sow.html). How do you feel being called a dog by people from the same country that you admire so much?"

Long Live the Start Menu [Infographic] | Pokki Blog - "Ironically, in ”about six weeks”, we saw millions of Windows 8 users beg to differ. In the six weeks following the launch of Windows 8, Pokki itself saw half a million downloads of our Start menu, Stardock sold tens of thousands of copies of Start8, and it took only 30 days for 30 different Start menu replacements to come to market. All of which is early proof of our original hypothesis that people need, want, and use the Start menu more than ever... People use the Start Menu more often than they Check Facebook"

Why the world is running out of helium - "Scientists have warned that the world's most commonly used inert gas is being depleted at an astonishing rate because of a law passed in the United States in 1996 which has effectively made helium too cheap to recycle. The law stipulates that the US National Helium Reserve, which is kept in a disused underground gas field near Amarillo, Texas – by far the biggest store of helium in the world – must all be sold off by 2015, irrespective of the market price. The experts warn that the world could run out of helium within 25 to 30 years, potentially spelling disaster for hospitals, whose MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form, and anti-terrorist authorities who rely on helium for their radiation monitors, as well as the millions of children who love to watch their helium-filled balloons float into the sky... Professor Richardson also believes that party balloons filled with helium are too cheap, and they should really cost about $100 (£75) to reflect the precious nature of the gas they contain"

Flu fears, rains buoy Cambodia rat exports to Vietnam - ""If you prepare them well and fry the meat with garlic and put some mint on it, they're tastier than chickens"... "Rat meat substitutes well for pork these days," said Khe Le, adding that her family exported up to a tonne of live rats across the border on good days. Rat meat was eaten in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s and for some time afterwards when little else was available. The poor took to rat meat last year when the price of other meat soared, but younger Cambodians tend to avoid it. In Vietnam, rat meat is something of a delicacy... "Some rats are as big as piglets, 2 kilos, and that has intrigued the Vietnamese. They see them as wild animals and they find them tasty," Marong said. Bun Tuon Simona, a Cambodian official in the southern province of Kandal, said the Vietnamese appetite for rat meat has helped a government campaign to get rid of the rodents that were destroying rice fields"

Sexual satisfaction in premarital relationships: Associations with satisfaction, love, commitment, and stability - "At each wave of the study, sexual satisfaction was associated positively with relationship satisfaction, love, and commitment for both men and women. In addition, change in sexual satisfaction between Time 1 and Time 2 was associated with change over the same period in relationship satisfaction, love, and commitment. Furthermore, some evidence was found that sexual satisfaction was associated with relationship stability. Overall, sexual satisfaction had stronger links with relationship quality for men than for women."

Bob's House -- Pepsi's new Super Bowl Ad - YouTubeComments: ".....what.the.fuck. Who﻿ the fuck thought it was ok to mock the deaf like this?"
"Ahhh another uninformed/unintelligent individual with internet access. Do you know anything at all about the Deaf culture??? They know how to joke a lot﻿ and definitely love this commercial. Learn before you post man."
"They're not mocking them. It's joke people within Deaf culture would understand and laugh about. You only think it's mockery because people who are differently﻿ abled are pitied in our society. Deaf people actually joke about this themselves."

Your Looks and Your Inbox « OkTrends - "a woman is as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, and the majority of women have been rated about “medium.” The chart looks normalized, even though it’s just the unfiltered opinions of our male users... women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve... the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway... Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.""the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process" is a nice euphemism is a good euphemism for "women are crazy"

In-flight internet: Coach potatoes | The Economist - "To prove that this is not an early April fools jape, Boeing has even produced a video, and a bunch of experts, explaining the approach. Potatoes, it turns out, affect the a Wi-Fi signal in much the same way people do."

Michael Kimmel: The Unbearable Whiteness of Suicide-by-Mass-Murder - "In urban settings, when young men of color experience that same sense of aggrieved entitlement - that perception of victimhood despite everything men expect for themselves - they may react violently, and even with lethal violence. But the victims of their violence are usually those whom the shooter believes have wronged him, and the unintended and accidental victims caught in the line of fire. And it rarely ends with his suicide. White men, on the other hand, have a somewhat more grandiose purpose: they want to destroy the entire world in some cataclysmic, video-game, and action movie-inspired apocalypse. If I'm going to die, then so is everybody else, they seem to say. Yes, of course, this is mental illness speaking: but it is mental illness speaking with a voice that has a race and a gender"

S Korea's mass event for singles flooded by men - inSing.com - ""Where the hell are the girls? I can't find any," said Kim Sung-Sik, a 23-year-old college student, describing the event as "utterly disappointing".
"This is awful... I didn't come all this way to get stuck in a bunch of smelly guys," said another male participant who declined to be named. "It looks like there are more doves flying around here than there are girls... I feel like I'm in the army again," he said, referring to the two years of military service mandatory for all South Korean men."

"Deep down, my adored Papa, you would have been very unhappy with a woman like me, because I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls. You try to live in both worlds: time for the marvelous and time for ordinary life. I choose the moon, even for breakfast. But no concessions to the quotidian" ― Anaïs Nin

"Ability will never catch up with the demand for it." - Malcolm Forbes

***

If a girl posts a hideous pic of herself, will her girlfriends still all gush about how gorgeous she looks?

Part of being a feminist seems to be being needlessly confrontational. Probably as an outlet for anger.

I am tempted to scold all the cyclists who ride on the pavement, but I might get beaten up, since they treat pedestrians as if the latter are the ones are in the wrong.

"I checked in on 4sq so if I get murdered people will know how to find my body"

Breastfeeding has been described as a religion. Yet, it's not so much that it is a religion as that children - and anything related to children - are one, from the examples of: Megan's laws, the "Gay Agenda", Tuition, TV violence, Neuro-linguistic programming, Music lessons, Child porn etc

"When I was a University professor, I came in contact with a lot of very young people through mentorship and outreach programs. Little girls were brilliant and scientifically minded. That is, until they discovered makeup. Then it was like a great cosmic ice pick plunged into their foreheads."

"The best way to get over a guy is to get under another one"

RT @TheFunnySexist: I believe in equality. All women are equally insane.

[On the People's Association] "I'm of the persuasion that the PA serves absolutely no purpose to the average citizen for the amount they cost, let alone additional overseas retreats :P... I've never met or heard of someone attending or signing up to attend PA organized activities."
"I've never had to live in nursing homes and I don't know people who does. But I'm not stupid enough to claim nursing homes serves no purpose though."
(this was on the whole affair about the overseas trip - one reason why working for the government sucks)

On PRCs not integrating in Singapore: "It's funny, I think back to (mainland) Chinese students in the US and have the impression that they may think some parts of US culture are silly but they work pretty hard to integrate, pick up a good accent, etc. I guess the US is the promised land, or maybe it was just my school."

I'm sure a lot of people who are against the ISA are the same people who are for a separation of Church & State. (On the Nicholas Chia ISA affair)

Overheard: "were you born a vegetarian?"

"I've lived in cities in the UK, US, and Canada for extended periods and traveled extensively (no less than 40 countries) and I have to say people in general are much less friendly in Singapore. The only place that I can think of with people as unfriendly exist in the NYC subway."

"I exercised once but found that I was allergic to it. My skin flushed and my heart raced. I got sweaty and short of breath. Very dangerous."

"Facebook is where people tell lies to their friends and Twitter is where people tell the truth to strangers"

"Occupy Wall Street﻿ just pitch tents and drink $8 lattes while complaining about how poor they are on Twitter with their $1500 MacBooks"

RT: @TheFunnySexist: I just read that iPhone users have more sex than Blackberry users. Should I worry that my girlfriend has an iPhone and I have a Blackberry?

"The weather is bad. The people are loud. The girls are ugly" - on Hong Kong (some say this should refer to Singapore instead)

Friday, December 28, 2012

"I promise that I will not play more than one account
I promise I will not communicate in games outside of the game mechanisms
I promise I will not ally based on who I know in the game
I promise I will not carry grudges across games"

"Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." - Alexander Pope

***

Defamation Act (CHAPTER 75)

Slander of women
4. Words spoken and published which impute unchastity or adultery to any woman or girl shall not require special damage to render them actionable.

According to a lawyer friend of mine, the difference between libel and slander is that libel is written while slander is spoken.

The written word is presumed to be more important than spoken, so you can prosecute someone for libel (written) even if you cannot show that you were personally harmed by what they wrote.

On the other hand, for slander (spoken) one must show that one has suffered damages from the slander before one can sue under the Defamation Act. Except in this case, when a female is accused of unchastity or adultery.

The irony is that, as always, even laws that don't actively harm women such as this do more subtle, insidious damage. In this case, that chastity and fidelity in marriage are more important to women than men, with the accompanying implications of the sexual double standard, objectification of women and so

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

"Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having." - Ambrose Bierce

***

Frigid Girl on "Apparently psychosis does not deter everyone. Caveat Amator.": so it doesn't deter u?

Me: hurr
of course it does
that's why I ignored the crazy girl [time period]

Frigid Girl: so what does your status mean
hehe

Me: apparently that psycho girl has been dating one guy since [quite a long time ago]
I'm surprised. maybe she's not psycho with white guys

Frigid Girl: usually they aren't
maybe white guys are used to psycho girls

Me: hurr hurr

Temptation Chris: y u think men have more unrequited love than women
i find women are more practical
when the woman has unrequited love there is usually less sympathy
(great expectations/les mis)
maybe cause writers are men
-_-

Me: nope
because we live in a world where man proposes and woman disposes
so a lot of men are turned down by women
then they have unrequited love until it's requited, or they move on, or they find someone new to chase

Temptation Chris: i guess so
but women who do unrequited love are stupid
cause they have other ppl proposing?

Me: perhaps
as a good economist I believe in the concept of opportunity cost =D

Temptation Chris: ???????
so because women have options
their unrequited love is simply opportunity cost?
men leh

Me: no
the opportunity cost is the other men after them
if they choose to consider unrequited love

Temptation Chris: yar lor
but what if the other men are not as good haha
anyway men also opportunity cost
can try luck with other girls

Me: presumably the other men are not as good
that's why the girl won't want them
yah got opportunity cost for men
but those sales are not guaranteed

Temptation Chris: haha
thats why for women to have unrequited love is even more ennobling right
since it doenst make pragmatic sense
plus the woman is not conventionally the pursuer
so more jialat for her
plus women and age etc
haha.
well

Me: "Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose"

Someone in Europe: I'm taking a Literature class this semester to fulfill university
graduation requirements
I'm just doing it out of necessity and not out of interest, and I said
as much during my self-introductiong in the first class
After attending the lectures, I really understand why some parents are
so upset that their kids choose to study the humanities at university

Me: oh?

Someone: Literature classes are especially bad
They're still discussing really out-moded theories like psychoanalysis
and they like to 'read between the lines' even when there are possibly
no hidden meanings

Me: as I always say, there's a reason psychoanalysis is under the
literature department, and not the psychology department

Someone: Generally they are just really prone to fuzzy thinking, or
interpreting things in a way that's 'poetic' or 'romantic'

Me: well get back to me at the end of term!

Someone: I feel like my prefrontal cortex shrinks a little bit with every class

Someone else: that day i heard *** talk bout this girl
then i realised i prob turned *** off ten thousand times
cause im so unenthu
hah
:/ oh well

"War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military." - Georges Clemenceau

***

David Edelstein on Les Misérables -- Vulture - "When an actor begins to sing, the camera rushes in and fastens on the performer’s face, positioning itself just below the head, somewhere between the navel and the Adam’s apple—and canted from 30 to 45 degrees, although the angle changes as the performer moves and the operator scampers to keep up. I imagined the cameraman to be small, fleet, and extremely high strung, like Gollum. The actors must have had to cultivate an inner stillness to keep from recoiling from him/it. A Zen forbearance would also have kept them from grimacing at all their missed notes... I must cast my lot with the late Nora Ephron, who resisted Susan Boyle’s thunderous debut on Britain’s Got Talent singing the show’s most famous song, “I Dreamed a Dream”: “That song is worse than all of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it’s worse than ‘It’s a Small World After All.’ [It’s] the all-time most horrible song ever in history, and the reason is simple: It sticks in your brain and never stops playing … And just when you think it’s gone, you see the title in print, and it starts playing again... The actors appear visibly relieved to have gotten through it and not to have to do it again eight times a week. Or perhaps it’s because for the first time all evening, they’re not being charged by a rampaging camera”

Theologian Hans Küng condemns pope's modern 'Inquisition' - "Ratzinger shifted to the right, embracing institutional continuity. Küng attacked papal infallibility as an accident of history, devoid of genuine theological meaning. Küng sees the clergy abuse crisis and the crackdown on the leadership council of American nuns as symptoms of a pathological power structure. By his lights, the impact on church moral authority, and finances, is a crisis rivaling the Protestant Reformation... Polls since 1968 have shown that some 85 percent of Catholics do not follow the birth control teaching... Küng likened Ratzinger to the Grand Inquisitor, in Dostoyevski’s “The Brothers Karamazov” — the sinister monk who tells Jesus the masses must be subdued by superstition for religion to maintain its power... “The Roman Inquisition continues to exist,” he writes, “with methods of psychological torture and the use in our day of many enforcement manuals”"

Scholarly Standards in Feminist Science Studies - "I submitted an article to the feminist journal Women’s Studies International Forum, and in February 2010 I was informed that the journal had decided against publication. Nothing unusual in that, of course. No doubt the great majority of articles submitted to journals are rejected, for a multitude of reasons. But when I enquired why no reason had been given, the Editor-in-Chief replied that the paper had not been sent out for review as she did not feel that it had sufficient evidence in terms of references or citations to back up some of the claims that were made. Now, whatever deficiencies there may have been in the article, insufficient citation was not one of them. In fact it was profusely referenced, with some sixty citations in an article of approximately 4000 words (Esterson 2009). The explanation was clearly spurious... Rose writes that the marriage was initially happy and mutually appreciative, exemplified by Einstein’s “explain[ing] to a group of Zagreb intellectuals that he needed his wife as ‘she solves all the mathematical problems for me’.” Now one might have thought that the contention that Einstein’s first wife solved all his mathematical problems for him is something that required further investigation before endorsement. However, Rose is content to take the claim at face value... A highly regarded feminist sociologist has uncritically reproduced claims about alleged contributions to Einstein’s celebrated 1905 papers by his first wife on the sole basis of an article which itself is almost entirely based on contentions in a book that fails to comply with the most fundamental scholarly standards... both authors reveal a propensity to endorse claims that are in accord with their preconceptions regardless of the calibre of the purported evidence. It is perhaps unsurprising that the editors of Women’s Studies International Forum are reluctant to be a party to revealing information of a nature likely to be unpalatable to many of its readers"More outstanding Feminist Scholarship

Giving Feminism a Bad Name - "In CBS’s nationwide random sample of 1,150 U.S. adults, 65% of women and 58% of men identified as feminist when an equal-rights definition was provided, but only 24% of women and 14% of men considered themselves feminist in the absence of a definition... A female journalist with apparent gender feminist leanings writing for a gender feminist blog about women's issues has attacked an idiotic study co-authored by two weirdos female scientists that may help women avoid falling prey to predatory sexual abuse by men. If that passes for feminism, then what in the world constitutes misogyny? Is there really any wonder why the overwhelming majority of American women and men want nothing to do with the feminist label? Why one-in-five people consider calling someone a feminist an insult? "

What Women and Men Should Be, Shouldn't be, are Allowed to be, and don't Have to Be: The Contents of Prescriptive Gender Stereotypes - "Women in masculine roles, like our Princeton female undergraduates, are not just held to higher (irrelevant) standards of feminine niceness than are their male counterparts; they are also not held to equally high (relevant) standards of agency and achievement. If they show high levels of intelligence, competence, rationality, and ambition, that is good—these qualities are certainly desirable for Princeton women. But if they do not, that is not so bad—not as bad as if Princeton men failed to demonstrate high levels of these qualities. Do these disparate standards constitute discrimination against women? We believe they do. In a context in which achievement is paramount, the leeway given to women on achievement-related traits is no favor. Instead, it reflects “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” to borrow a phrase used by President George W. Bush to describe the treatment of ethnic minority students in the classroom. The fact that Princeton women are perceived as equal or even superior to Princeton men on most of these traits does not render the disparate standards any less discriminatory."

Divine Gamebook Creator - "Powerful tools
Use the powerful condition system to create variables that persist through pages and lead to different outcomes.
You can even create a full RPG-like system with it!"

Most work more than 40 hours a week - "A survey conducted last month by Singapore Press Holdings' online job portal STJobs found that 65 per cent of over 3,000 respondents clock an average of more than 40 hours a week, spending more time than they should at work... almost eight in 10 employees in Singapore have not fully utilised, and are likely to forgo, their annual-leave entitlement this year"

Wealth and happiness across the world: Material prosperity predicts life evaluation, whereas psychosocial prosperity predicts positive feeling. - "Income was a moderately strong predictor of life evaluation but a much weaker predictor of positive and negative feelings. Possessing luxury conveniences and satisfaction with standard of living were also strong predictors of life evaluation. Although the meeting of basic and psychological needs mediated the effects of income on life evaluation to some degree, the strongest mediation was provided by standard of living and ownership of conveniences. In contrast, feelings were most associated with the fulfillment of psychological needs: learning, autonomy, using one's skills, respect, and the ability to count on others in an emergency. Thus, two separate types of prosperity—economic and social psychological—best predict different types of well-being"

Women and gay men are 'worst drivers' - "both perform poorly in tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness when compared to heterosexual men... Both tend to rely on local landmarks to get around, and are also slower to take in spatial information... gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in a similar way, sharing the same weaknesses. The results back earlier studies supporting the stereotype that women are poor navigators"

Vipul Naik's answer to Do some women hate feminism? If so, why? - Quora - "My best guess regarding this is that women who find certain tenets of feminism disagreeable take more offense because they are concerned that feminists presume to speak for women at large, and are concerned that they, as individual women, might be blamed for the actions of feminism, or might be believed to have feminist beliefs. For this reason, their opposition to feminism tends to be stronger than that of men who are equally unconvinced by feminism. To take a related example, Americans might be a lot more offended at wrong-headed statements from an American politician than by equally wrong-headed statements from, say, a French politician, because they (rightly or wrongly) think that the American politician's statements will be taken as reflective of how Americans at large think and speak."

Herbert Kretzmer dreamed a dream – and Les Misérables never looked back - " He did not merely translate Les Misérables – his French is “wretched”. He read Victor Hugo’s novel in English and worked with a literal translation of the French libretto. “You cannot translate a song,” he says. “You can translate a textbook and even a novel, but a song is no more than a compendium of nuances and references and illusions, with a resonance within a particular culture. It does not have much resonance outside that culture. “So simply to translate the words into their dictionary meaning isn’t going to work. It doesn’t interest me”... Song-writing and journalism are, he says, compatible. “Both involve the manipulation of the English language under duress""

"Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough." - Groucho Marx

***

To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart - NYTimes.com - "If some enterprises, public or private, can be said to be “too big to fail,” Congo is the reverse: it is too big to succeed. It is an artificial entity whose constituent parts share the misfortune of having been seized by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in the name of a rapacious 19th-century Belgian monarch. From the moment Congo was given independence in 1960, it was being torn apart by centrifugal forces, beginning with separatism in the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga... Rather than nation-building, what is needed to end Congo’s violence is the opposite: breaking up a chronically failed state into smaller organic units whose members share broad agreement or at least have common interests in personal and community security"

Unicorn lair 'discovered' in North Korea - "they have "recently reconfirmed" the lair of one of the unicorns ridden by the ancient Korean King Tongmyong, founder of a kingdom which ruled parts of China and the Korean peninsula from the the 3rd century BC to 7th century AD."

SHAOLIN STYLE KICK IN THE NUTS 2 - YouTube - "The book of 'Chinese Shaolin Kungfu'. This is Iron Egg Skill. It's also called 'Groin Skill' or 'Gold Armour'. This is a mysterious skill of soft techniques. It is to practise the testicles"

Thanks for Not Sharing - NYTimes.com - "It is tempting to call this unctuous ooze of status updates and vacation snaps seeping across Facebook and Twitter and the rest information overload. But that would be to debase the word “information”... As for Kate she let the world know the status of her labor: “Contractions 3 minutes apart and dilated at 2 cm.” Social media does not mean that you have to be that social. And then there was a Facebook post from Scott telling Addie how she is “my lover, my heart” and — my own heart sank — his “best friend.” It is very fashionable these days to call the love of one’s life one’s best friend. I cannot imagine why. Surely one has best friends in part in order to be able to talk to them about the problems with one’s loves"

Prosecutors Drop Charge Related to "Passing Gas" in DUI Case - "When police were trying to get fingerprints, police say Cruz moved closer to the officer and passed gas on him. The investigating officer remarked in the criminal complaint that the odor was very strong. Cruz is now charged with battery on a police officer, as well as DUI and obstruction"

‘The Generals,’ by Thomas E. Ricks - NYTimes.com - "“a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war”... The flip side of the current system is that promotion even for the most successful combat leaders occurs at a glacial pace: Just as there is scant penalty for failure, there is also little short-term promise of reward for outstanding leadership. No one rockets to the top the way Eisenhower did... rather than admit institutional failure, the Army hierarchy usually prefers to keep a manifestly mediocre or even incompetent commander in his or her post on the theory that the officer will rotate out anyway before long"

Escher Girls - "Now THAT makes total sense! Maybe that’s what’s going on with some of the pictures in the “boobs don’t work that way” tag"

Fake compliments vs. fake insults - "Fake insults from a friend with a tell-tale smile are not exactly hard to decipher. Female dishonesty is much more dishonest, though equally well-intentioned, because it is the whole point of giving a fake compliment is that the person believes what you say... To quote Louis Armstrong, a fake compliment is really saying "I love you". But I believe that we should get into the habit of saying "I love you" instead of giving false compliments... Disbelieving reality is called psychosis, and should generally be avoided. In other words, it doesn't matter how many people tell you that you can jump off a cliff and survive, people that jump off cliffs die. Reality trumps society. That's why false compliments lead to trouble. Let's take an obvious example: terrible singers who audition for American Idol because their friends told them they were good. Eventually, the false perception caused by insincere compliments will be contradicted by reality. In the case of American Idol, that contradiction is public and humiliating... I never believe a compliment from anybody who has not given me solidly negative feedback a few times"

Battle of the Sexes: Are Men Better Drivers Than Women? - "Researchers who studied thousands of traffic accidents over a 20-year period came up with a finding that even they found surprising: Female drivers are far more likely to run into a car driven by another woman than a man... Crashes involving two female drivers were "overrepresented" in five out of six different crash scenarios: Variations on crossing another vehicle's path, side-swiping, turning in front of another vehicle, and head on. But here's the baffling part - when both vehicles were driven by a female, the crashes exceeded the expected frequency by at least 50 percent in two scenarios, and more than 25 percent in three others... In a nutshell, what that says is a woman is far more likely to crash into another woman than a man, but a man is less likely than expected to crash into another man"Keywords: men women better drivers, women drive better

Stoya™, Hysterical Literature - "He’s filming women sitting at a table reading literature. The twist is the things going on below the table... I’ve been told to dress as I would for a date with a man, not a boy. I’m wearing a dress from Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania collection last year. The cut limits the range of motion of my arms, but ideally I wouldn’t need to open my own doors or feel the desire to talk on my phone while on a date with a man. My makeup is simple, my heels very high but relatively practical, and my panties are both sophisticated and expensive... This attempting-to-read-aloud-and-maintain-composure while being sexually stimulated game is new. The video camera adds a dash of exhibitionism which I always appreciate. Most interesting, though, is the Hitachi that my vagina is about to be making very good friends with for the first time"

Bin2Iso - CodeProject - "This is a free tool for converting one CD image format (Bin) to another format (ISO). The conversion routine is very simple. Just read the Bin image and according to it's structure, write the data in another format"At 24k this is a really efficient program to convert BIN to ISO

Study: 'Tiger Mom' Parenting May Backfire - "Chinese American students were more depressed, had lower self-esteem, and more anxiety than white students... One key may be to encourage social activities like sleepovers, which Chua infamously banned in Battle Hymn. “Children need the ability to work well with other people, to relate”"

Gender roles: When women dare to outearn men | The Economist - "As long as the woman earns less, her income does not cause trouble in the marriage. Once she earns more, however, marriage difficulties jump and divorce rates increase. Interestingly, it does not seem to matter whether she earns only slightly more, or substantially more—an indication that it is not female income per se, but the mere fact of earning more, that causes trouble. Economists may wonder why people with "rational expectations" enter such a marriage at all. The answer is: many do not. The marriage market, as economists bluntly call it, clears much less often in regions in which more women have the potential to outearn men, the paper shows."How come people never say women want richer men? If you ignore the role of women's preferences you are objectifying themAddendum: The paper is "Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households"

» Amae – 甘え - "Amae (甘え) is a Japanese concept/word that is used to describe people’s behavior when you desire to be loved, you desire someone to take care of you, when you want unconsciously to be depending on another person (your parents, your wife/husband or even your boss) with a certain meaning of submission. For example, a person with lots of amae would be the one who is capricious so he/she gets the attention from other people, children are the best example of amae behavior, always aiming for pamper from their parents. There is amae everywhere in the world, but it is interesting that in the Japanese language there is a concrete word to describe it, there is even a verb amaeru that means “depend on the benevolence of others”. It happens that in Japan the amae phenomenon is very exaggerated and you find 40 years old women who act like a 15 years old girl. Japanese men like girls with childish faces, they expect childish behavior from women, they like them submissive; they usually prefer this prototype, known as “kawai”, than an elegant, beautiful woman with a strong character. Here in Japan, men/boyfriends/husbands like to be the protectors of their women, it seems they don’t like to feel that the women is the one with the control over them"This sounds slightly less irritating than sajiao/sa jiao